8 Reasons Your Business Needs Content Marketing

If I asked you what your lead generation and customer acquisition strategy is today, what would you say? Are you active on social media? Are you emailing your list? Where does your marketing budget go? Probably towards paid advertising, right?

What if I told you that in 2015, nearly 200 million people were using ad blockers. Where does that leave you?

Don’t get me wrong, paid advertising is a powerful marketing tactic. It has the potential to grow your business, retain your customers, and boost your conversion rate. However, in today’s ads and spam-filled internet, people are looking for a friendlier user experience that cancels out all the noise.
If your whole marketing strategy relies on paid advertising, now is the time for you to consider implementing content marketing in your business.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing can be defined as a long term marketing strategy that leverages valuable, relevant, and consistent content, to build a rapport with your audience and raise brand awareness. It comes in a variety of formats (not only blogs) and has tangible benefits for your business.

Content marketing is most likely the most effective way for you to reach out to both your current clients and prospects, and establish a meaningful relationship with them.

If you are still not sure about adopting a content marketing strategy, here are 8 reasons why your business needs it today.

1. Return on investment (ROI)

As a business owner, it is important for you to assess any new marketing strategies in terms of return on investment (also known as ROI).

Using the paid advertising example, before you started, you were probably able to project how much business it can generate over a certain period of time.

When it comes to content marketing, it is a whole different story. By adopting the right content strategy in your business, you can count on a greater return, on a smaller investment.

Whether you chose to do it yourself or outsource your content production, it still counts as a much cheaper form of advertising.

This is extremely relevant to small businesses in particular. As a small business owner, you have to be strategic about your marketing dollars. Investing in content marketing is indeed a budget-friendly strategy, but it is sure to deliver high-end results.

2. Quality leads

Let’s get one thing clear, lead generation is the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy.. It is the one metric that we watch closely and by which we assess the success of our marketing efforts.

When it comes to lead generation, content marketing simply marvels at it. It not only attracts new visitors to your website, it peaks curiosity about your product and auto-selects quality leads. What do I mean by that?

A quality lead is a lead that is extremely close, or on the verge of the purchasing phase. They have already made up their mind and they are ready to purchase.

A thoroughly developed content strategy nurtures your prospects, educates them on the uniqueness of your brand, raises awareness about a challenge or issue they might have, and offers the ultimate solution: your product/service.

3. Seamless self-promotion

How many of us are guilty of blasting their promotions and sales 24/7 on their social media? Raise your hand..trust me, you are not alone.

Your customers chose to subscribe to your newsletter, and follow you on social media because they want to hear from you. They want to build a relationship with you.

Being given their attention is a valuable thing that you need to carefully manage. Instead of promoting your business relentlessly, you need to commit to giving them value beyond your product.

Content marketing enables you to seamlessly promote yourself, without it feeling forced. By creating these valuable and relevant resources, you implicitly promote your brand and become their go-to resource.

4 Build trust with your audience

This is where the quality and relevancy of the content you produce comes into play.

If you commit to consistently publish insightful content, you not only offer value-free of charge, you also establish yourself as an expert in your field.

It will build trust with your audience, as they will be more willing to share your content and return to your website for more information.

The truth is, people are always more inclined to hire an expert that they trust rather than someone they don’t know.

How do you get there? The answer is, you guessed it: content marketing.

5. Increase website traffic

From the first day, you built your website and went live, wasn’t web traffic your ultimate goal? After all, the higher your website traffic gets the more prospect potential and more business.

With content marketing, website traffic increase is guaranteed. As you publish frequent and valuable content, your credibility rises and your audience will keep looking for more resources and more answers from you. And where can they find you? Your website!

As a matter of fact, your website traffic is not the only thing that benefits from content marketing. Soon enough, your audience will follow you on social media to engage with you more and subscribe to your emails for constant updates. List building anyone?

6. Solidify your brand identity

If I said red and white soda drink, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Coca-cola maybe?

If I asked you what is the number one electronic device manufacturer, did you say Apple? Have you ever used the word Google as a verb? Probably yes.

That my friend is what brand identity is all about. Your product or service answers a question, solves a problem, facilitates a challenge.

Your brand however is your level of influence, your strong presence on the market, and how you are perceived by the public.

Adopting a content marketing strategy enables you to solidify your brand identity, and contributes to your business longevity.

7. Measurable KPI’s

Your KPI’s (key performance indicators) are the metrics by which you assess your marketing strategy success. As a business owner, you need to actively track your KPI’s and adjust your strategy accordingly.

With content marketing, you have endless opportunities to measure your content performance. As I mentioned, adopting a content strategy reflects on your business as a whole.

You don’t have to guess whether or not it is working, you simply look at your website traffic, lead generation, social media engagement, and revenue to draw conclusions.

8.Fully outsourceable

Reason # 8 your business needs content marketing, and the most convenient one of all is that you don’t have to do it yourself.

As we’ve already established, content marketing is a lower cost high-value form of marketing that benefits your business in many ways, when done right.
As you are committed to building and growing your business, content production should be a priority indeed, but the smart thing to do is to outsource it. There are many field experts, writers, and marketers who can offer those services — such as yours truly — it is just one more marketing strategy for you to automate and focus on your business.

Conclusion

The truth is, I cannot think of a single business that cannot benefit from content marketing. It is a bulletproof strategy to boost your website traffic, generate leads, create engagement, at a much lower marketing cost.